Stilltitled

Clear signs of a recovery have yet to emerge, and job losses and the steady stream of foreclosures are keeping many markets under pressure. Sales of both new and existing homes continued to struggle to find a bottom…The home buying market will continue to struggle until the foreclosure crisis comes to an end. Although new federal efforts may prevent millions of families from losing their homes, mounting job losses will likely keep foreclosures at elevated levels.

…echo boomers will help keep demand strong for the next 10 years and beyond…Even under the low immigration assumptions, minorities will fuel 73 percent of household growth in 2010-20, with Hispanics leading the way at 36 percent.

—Quote from recent report by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies

We are in uncharted waters, and there are still risks of a sudden emergence of unexpected financial turbulence. While there are first signs that the pace of economic weakening is decelerating, we must remain alert…Currently, we are still in the downturn phase — a downturn that globally is proving to be the deepest since the Second World War.

—Jean-Claude Trichet at a conference in Madrid today, as the ECB has updated its growth forecast from -2.7% in March to -4.6% in 2009, today.

World Bank updates its forecast for global growth to -2.6% from -1.7%

The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did any where. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep.

—Thomas Jefferson on newspapers, with a nod toward a bucolic and idealized view of primitive society

NYT Newsroom: “what separates us from everyone else: that’s the reporting and the writing and the scope,” John Geddes, managing editor in charge of newsroom operations

• Bbudget: $200m
• 1250 people, “close to it’s peak…fewer reporters covering local news…more covering Washington and more overseas than a decade ago”

Scott Heekin-Canedy, president and GM of NYT, considering a metered and membership model, with offers of increased access to the NYT

From Clark Hoyt’s op-ed in the NYT

The choice isn’t between rationing and not rationing. It’s between rationing well and rationing badly. Given that the United States devotes far more of its economy to health care than other rich countries, and gets worse results by many measures, it’s hard to argue that we are now rationing very rationally.

—David Leonhardt

Concluding that the Fed is leading us into inflation assumes a degree of incompetence that I simply don’t buy.

—Alan Blinder

Today’s unemployment report from the Department of Labor is further proof that these are serious times in New York State that require the full attention of every elected member of the Legislature. If senators do not wish to go to work, there are more than 800,000 New Yorkers ready to take their jobs — and salary — today.
—Governor Paterson

Clear Capital organizes a network of appraisers, inspectors, & brokers / agents for real estate research.